Linux-fueled Thoughts Unhinged

(This post is from November 6, 2022.)

There is a bit of random writing on the flashlight on the Mudita Pure and the short film documentary on Andrew Huang.

Flashlight on the Mudita Pure

The full user guide is the only written piece of writing that says the flashlight on the Pure is itself a button.

Of course, this button is almost flush with the chassis of the phone and requires quite a bit of force with the index finger to activate with a short press. The default flashlight color is the “blueish” light. Once activated, the light can be toggled to the “reddish” light mode by a short press. The flashlight is fully turned off with a long press (at least 2 seconds, I think).

Nobody is talking about this device's flashlight... though I'm not sure how helpful it actually is IRL. The flashlight looks pretty bright, when I (stupidly) point it to my eyes during the daytime, though I think this won't be helpful in truly dark places, such as a real forest.

The Hactivist: Andrew Huang documentary

The Hactivist came out in September 2022... and I didn't even know about it.

I got caught up with it at the end of October 2022, like a loser... (instead of keeping up with Halloween uploads on YouTube — BTW, I hate YouTube now and I literally only wait around for any uploads from Nexpo, video game essays from Pyrocynical, or a Backrooms video from Kane Pixels; that's it — everything about the easy to use side of the internet has been co-opted by corporate interests and fricken Elon Musk owns Twitter now?)

Anyways, I think the panel discussion is very insightful. I haven't finished it, but I've already learned that I was severely misguided on how easy Huang's “What's That Ware?” teardowns to the populated PCBs of various electronic hardware pieces are.

You see, you should ideally have 3 copies of whatever you want to tear down. The first one should be basically broken, so that you won't have to worry about breaking anything. (That's a Roll Safe mindset right there.) The second piece should be your test device. Lastly, the third piece should be the one that you open up “for real”.

This is how Hugh Jeffries makes opening the latest iPhone or Android flagship so easy — he has prior experience opening up completely dead smartphones. He has probably even had complete duds that he wasn't able to save — thus, I doubt those failures are recorded. Jeffries could be said to be part of the “Instagram reality” mental health sink filter bubble phenomena, but at least Jeffries makes more meaningful content than MKBHD in 2022.

What is the point of new consumer tech products if we don't own them — both in hardware repairability and in the software/OS/firmware? Exactly — and the fact that you are indebted to Lou from Unbox Therapy for harping on the ThinkPad X1 Carbon so much that this is the only model of ThinkPad that dbrand makes a laptop skin for is... a linear combination of slight good but mostly bad consumerism. (Hey, dbrand won't make a skin for the HP Dev One, or any HP laptop for that matter... which may actually be well deserved for the latter, but at least there's a laptop skin for the Framework Laptop. Also, I've just come to accept that any System76 laptop will never have a dbrand skin...)

There is a Feedback Loop podcast interview with Andrew Huang. This seems interesting, as Huang has something substantial to say during any interviews. Basically, he's the Bruce Lee of interviewing, and at least interviewers actually in tune with technology are not interrupting Huang.

(For reference, you may find the full interview from The Pierre Berton Show. I tried watching the original video that a bunch of “inspirational” videos sample, which are churned out to please the YouTube algorithm, but in retrospect the interviewer's rudeness from all of his poorly timed and even anachronistic interruptions is so cringe inducing that I had to stop watching. The fact that Lee had enough forbearance to at least not be visibly angered in the slightest is amazing — sure, you don't have to be a Jesus to be capable of that forbearance, but this level of subtle achievement must be noted.)

Anyways, I was interested because part of the documentary was made in Boston. I'm going to conjecture that this was the post-production of the film. I don't claim to be an expert on outdoor Boston proper (or the metro Boston area) scenery (except for The Equalizer films), but I don't recognize any scenes from Boston. Or maybe the interview excerpts with the social psychologist was recorded in the Boston area?

My only “real” thoughts on this documentary was the social psychologist's insistence on the framework of hackers existing on the one-dimensional hacker spectrum of white hat, grey hat, and black hat.

That line of thinking is stuck in the 1990s or early 2000-nots.

If you wanted the ultimate dichotomy, use the hacker and vectoralist ditchotomy from A Hacker's Manifesto by MacKenzie Wark. I haven't been able to overcome initial intertia for this book, but the very first chapters are very good... (sort of like The Structure of Scientific Revolutions — the point is to read and understand the first half of the book. The later chapters (Chapters 9-13, IIRC) are not super necessary. Definitely ignore any later responses — I'm not capable of Enlightenment era treatises, and I'm not so sure that such long-winded pieces are practical or useful in 2022. (No, and this isn't because people have short attention spans due to Instagram and TikTok.)

If you use Wark's framework, then the “hackers” of sundry news stories of the Colonial pipeline hack or Lapsus$ are easily cast aside as bit players in the grand scheme of things (unless you are a dirty vectoralist — a “capitalist”, but even worse than Western “democratic” capitalism).

Anyways, the Singularity Group has a page for this documentary, but this doesn't include the podcast interview with Huang.

Conclusion

I hope that there is an eventual renaissance of hardware development in the U.S., now that there's this “semiconductor spending bill”, or formally known as CHIPS and Science Act, in August 2022.

The folks respectively behind brilliant companies like Framework and System76 aren't sitting around on each of their individual butts hoping, praying, and waiting for “the government” to make legitimately smart decisions, like Superman. (I have some thoughts on the documentary Waiting for Superman that inevitably falls into the “one-size fits all” solution to education fallacy.) Framework's genius is in the prioritization of repairability in the design of personal laptops, while System76 laptops have coreboot. (IMHO, wait until the latest System76 laptops have coreboot — othewise, you might as well buy the HP Dev One: a laptop that doesn't have any “Secure Boot”, due to no SD/PSP license from AMD, but at least the laptop will seamlessly update the laptop's firmware with fwupd via HP's participation on the Linux Vendor Firmware Service/LVFS.)

(While Intel ME or AMD SD/PSP can't be removed from any in production modern processor, which is compounded by soldered on CPUs; at least these devices come with coreboot out of the box, don't require manual flashing, and have CPU and RAM options that will reasonably last as a personal laptop for most doing non-GPU intensive tasks and code compiling for the next 3-5 years. This is the best pragmatic solution right now in late 2022 that doesn't make perfect the enemy of good/“good enough”, without going as practically insane with respect to hardware availability and/or pricing. The Insurgo PrivacyBeast X230 is always out of stock for both Grade A and Grade B and the Librem 14 is constantly recommended by the Qubes OS Forum but it's quite expensive for the higher configurations, even though the company has failed to deliver its Librem 5 to Henry of Techlore when he didn't use his “”“influencer”“” power to get the Librem 5... unlike Gardiner Bryant. I do like that the firmware's supposed to be updated and there is an established pragmatic “pipeline” for the firmware to update the Librem laptops from Purism, the anti-interdiction service for new/in-production hardware, and how Qubes OS allegedly works out of the box with the Librem 14 according to Qubes OS Forum users. However, I think there could be a more egalitarian and pragmatic solution for Qubes OS hardware... even if I disagree with Purism's choices, it's at least not the same reasons why Daniel Micay rails against Purism whenever Purism and GrapheneOS are mentioned in the same tweet on Twitter. Regardless of whether or not Purism is “cheating” to get the FSF's approval of PureOS on the Librem 5 according to Daniel Micay and Hector Martin of Asahi Linux — also, Ariadne Conill of security at Alpine Linux would probably have a generally negative opinion of Purism based on additional criticism of the FSF's relationship with firmware — this is still much better than most cheap Dell laptops that only get 2-3 firmware updates that are device specific within the first six months after initial release, before being effectively EOL'ed by Dell, as the dirty hardware manufacturer churns out more horrible computers... Even the Framework laptop offers a “beta” method with LVFS of updating the Framework's firmware for the Intel 11^th and 12^th generation CPU motherboards.)

I think these companies show that you don't have to turn into a Big Tech villain to survive as a business (especially when you are a truly private company that never will be publicly traded and attached to a board of directors/shareholders). Personal computers will always be needed, so as long as these companies have some sustainable profit in the true long term, small scale capitalism “just works”. It's when you make businesses unsustainably large, like every Big Tech company in 2022 or venture capital start ups hoping to be acquired by a Big Corporation, that capitalism becomes evil.

Obviously, we would probably want to get rid of X86_64 processors and have open source hardware solutions with either RISC-V or ARM computers with truly open-source hardware backed security elements that doesn't require the financial and resource backing of a literal evil Big Tech company like Open Titan from Google.

And well... I don't know where to start with that, but I do know one thing: it won't be “solved” overnight, that's for sure. The only thing actually good for “real” tech from MIT is the MIT license, and that help birth Intel ME and AMD's equivalent Secure Technology (or, Platform Security Processor/PSP).

(Try convincing the Trumpers about “draining the swamp” that fact of life.)

I feel like that PSP is simply a proprietary clone of the Intel ME, but I'm just a stupid idiot spewing out anti-Kacynskian socialization and Kacynskian leftism on the Fediverse via Write Freely — so don't quote me on that.

(The Pixel 5a's OEM support won't last forever for GrapheneOS, so... that GrapheneOS first phone better come out soon-ish — and it would come out faster, if Daniel Micay wasn't venting his paranoid malignant narcism at Henry from Techlore and CalyxOS all the time on Twitter.)

Tangent: No more Linux YouTube anymore

I regret passively watching Linux YouTubers and blindly agreeing with anything they said. Luke Smith, Mental Outlaw, DistroTube, Brodie Robertson, and Gardiner Bryant come to mind.

Luke Smith is now some sort of Monero shill (which is ok because Monero's ok on a technical level as a cryptocurrency, but Monero is still not usable to people like Louis Rossmann's IRL friends and coworkers); Mental Outlaw picking off of Luke Smith's younger audience that has probably stopped paying attention to Smith's lack of consistent uploads on YouTube after 2021; DistroTube can't actually be giving serious reviews or opinions if he literally reviews something every day; Robertson literally admitted in his video on FreeTube that he doesn't actually use most of the Linux tools he reviews on his channel, but he would make an exception for FreeTube — so he's just another opinion grifter projecting onto NEETs; and Gardiner Bryant uses his mini YouTuber “”“influencer”“” status to get the Librem 5 on time and to get first dibs on having an opinion on the HP Dev One... without actually trying to use the device itself, yet called it a potential “ThinkPad killer”.

At least Jay Croix from LearnLinuxTV actually used the HP Dev One and made 2 videos on the actual laptop, while being open on possibly making a third video.

I feel like I've ultimately wasted a bunch of time watching these people, because you don't learn anything real from these people. You only learn Linux by reading the man pages in the CLI, reading what you need to know from the ArchWiki (or other equally high quality Linux resources, which may include Gentoo's documentation), and possibly browsing the AUR.

However, none of these people actually even lead by example when it comes to privacy and security. To be fair, none of them explicitly made statements among the lines that whatever they each use is more secure for desktop Linux than Windows. Though DistroTube has said he just uses the stock Samsung Android OS on whatever the latest Samsung flagship device is (back in 2021). Luke Smith started using LineageOS with root (which is actually bad post-2020, since GrapheneOS with Verified Boot exists). None of these people ever say that there are security downsides of disabling Secure Boot on UFEI computers. They generally enforce the opinion onto their viewers that ThinkPads are good laptops to install Linux onto, but don't say that you should try to investigate if you can update the laptop's firmware using fwupd. In fact, I can't update the firmware on the ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 6 because one of the Intel ME updates requires Windows with Secure Boot on. I'm not even sure that Privacy Guides even talks about this... yet.